2017-01-09

Noting the Swedish spy agency’s unusual technical abilities and reputation for secrecy, NSA officials also viewed it as an ideal collaborator on its hacking and cyberwarfare project, called Quantum. One of the Quantum programs was an ambitious operation called WINTERLIGHT, which aimed at secretly hacking into high-value foreign computers and computer networks to obtain not only communications data but also any information stored on the hard drives or servers in question. Possible targets might be the administrators of foreign computer networks, government ministries, oil, defense, and other major corporations, as well as suspected terrorist groups or other designated individuals. Similar Quantum operations have targeted OPEC headquarters in Vienna, as well as Belgacom, a Belgian telecom company whose clients include the European Commission and the European Parliament. (...)

Significantly, while WINTERLIGHT was a joint effort between the NSA, the Swedish FRA, and the British GCHQ, the hacking attacks on computers and computer networks seem to have been initiated by the Swedes. The FRA was setting up the implants on targeted computers—known in NSA parlance as “tipping”—to redirect their signals to the surveillance servers, thus allowing the GCHQ and the NSA to access their data, in what are called “shots.” At the time of the April 2013 meeting, the NSA reported that “last month, we received a message from our Swedish partner that GCHQ received FRA QUANTUM tips that led to 100 shots.”